Black Friday in Unemployed America

I found myself in the aisles of a remarkably quiet Walmart in Merced, California, on Friday. I had travelled there from San Francisco, where I live, because I wanted to see what Black Friday looked like in one of the most economically depressed parts of the country; Merced, in California’s Central Valley, had the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate in August, more than thirteen per cent.

Merced’s Walmart sits on a tree-lined commercial corridor called West Olive Avenue, a two-mile stretch populated largely by big-box retailers. To one side of Walmart, a Best Buy, an Applebee’s, and a Barnes & Noble huddle together; to the other is the Merced County Food Bank. I had braced myself for crowds of tense shoppers. But when I pulled up in the Walmart parking lot in the morning, it was only half full. Inside, families ambled about almost sleepily, as if still under the effects of tryptophan. A woman wearing pajamas bought two matching bottles of Head & Shoulders shampoo. An elderly woman stopped mid-aisle, and was comparing pillows (two dollars and fifty cents each) by pressing her fingers into them. Another woman cherry-picked Hollywood blockbuster Blu-ray DVDs (three dollars and ninety-six cents each). I found a middle-aged married couple in the electronics section, who assured me they weren’t there to shop: “We came here to watch the madness, but there’s nothing much happening.” (Hours later, I saw them leave with a cart full of household goods. “I guess we couldn’t help but join in,” the husband said.) When I stood in line to buy a reporter’s notebook for twenty-nine cents, the cashier commented that it was her lowest ring of the day. I asked her if it had been busy, and she replied, “Not today. Today is just like any other day.”

Over the past couple of years, retailers have been starting their holiday sales earlier and earlier. On Thanksgiving Day, 2011, Walmart opened at 10 P.M. This year, the Merced Walmart advertised two waves of sales, the first starting at 6 P.M. It took me a little while to realize that, despite the thin crowds, many of the aisles had already been stripped of goods. As of 10 A.M. on Friday, only one Samsung Smart TV remained; two men guarded a shopping cart in which it was crammed at an angle. Using their smartphones, they scanned the bar code and spent a half hour comparing prices online, to make sure that they were getting the best deal around. I left before they had made a decision.

The languid scene wasn’t unusual. Nationwide, sales dropped more than thirteen per cent on Friday from a year earlier. This partly had to do with the early sales, starting before Black Friday, and with online sales. But that doesn’t explain all of it: Thanksgiving-weekend purchases at stores and Web sites combined fell three per cent—the first spending decline since 2009, in the depths of the recession. U.S. consumer confidence fell to a seven-month low in November. The problem is that, while the economy has rebounded, wealthier Americans have benefitted more than most: a September study by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that ninety-five per cent of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top one per cent of earners.

To get a sense of how things have gone for the other ninety-nine per cent, visit Merced. The town of eighty thousand residents, and the county to which it belongs, experienced a massive building boom during the aughts and suffered disproportionately from the housing collapse. On Black Friday, a smattering of small businesses were open on Main Street: barbershops, a record store. But there was also a stretch of empty stores with available-for-rent signs gathering dust in the windows. In the center of Merced’s charming downtown, the only crowd, as far as I could tell, congregated outside a Catholic Charities office. I passed a couple who smiled at me; I also encountered a man weaving up and down the sidewalk, aggressively wielding a kitchen knife.

Some of the lowest-paid workers in the nation are, of course, those who work at Walmart itself. On Friday, employees protested at Walmarts across the nation, asking for higher wages, an increase in the percentage of full-time employees, and access to health care, among other demands. At Merced’s Walmart, there were no such protests to be seen. Brandon Baker, nineteen years old, told me that he was grateful to have work. A seasonal employee, he has been working at Walmart for about four weeks. He had been searching for work for two years, he said, and after the holidays he will go back to being unemployed. “I went to so many interviews before I got this job,” he told me. “One place told me I had to cut off all my facial hair, which I didn’t want to do, because I look like a little boy with no facial hair. But I did it anyway just to get the job, and they still didn’t hire me. That was at Panda Express; I was devastated.”